All Through the Night

The tune came first, and it came from Wales. "Ar Hyd y Nos" was printed in 1784, a full century before anyone sang the English words on this page. Sir Harold Boulton wrote "Sleep, my child, and peace attend thee" in 1884 and fitted it to the old Welsh air, and that pairing became the version most English-speaking families know. The two halves of the song are separated by a hundred years and by a language, which is worth keeping in mind when you sing it.

Origins

The melody appears in Musical Relics of the Welsh Bards, published in London in 1784 by Edward Jones, a harper from Merionethshire who served as bard to the Prince of Wales and collected Welsh airs at a time when many existed only in the memories of working musicians. Jones printed it as "Ar Hyd y Nos". The title translates literally as "all through the night", or more loosely "along the night".

The Welsh words sung today are not the ones Jones knew either. The best-known Welsh lyric is by John Ceiriog Hughes, the nineteenth-century poet and railway stationmaster who wrote under the name Ceiriog and supplied fresh words to dozens of traditional Welsh melodies.

The English lyric belongs to Sir Harold Edwin Boulton, an English songwriter and philanthropist who spent much of his career writing singable English verses for Scottish and Welsh folk tunes. The same year he produced "All Through the Night" he also wrote the words to the "Skye Boat Song", which followed the same method: an existing folk melody, a new English text, and a result that most listeners assume is centuries old.

The tune had a second life in chapels and hymnals, where it is catalogued under the name AR HYD Y NOS and carries several unrelated hymn texts. It also turns up in male voice choir programmes, school concerts and eisteddfod repertoire, usually sung in Welsh.

Meaning & Interpretation

The English words are spoken by someone sitting up with a sleeping child. The first verse promises protection: guardian angels sent by God, the hills and valleys asleep, and the singer "my loving vigil keeping". The second verse widens out to the moon on watch over a weary world, then moves inward again to the dreams settling on the child. Nothing happens in the song. That stillness is the point, and it is why the repeated line lands where it does, closing every other phrase with the same three-beat hush.

The Welsh original is less domestic in feeling. Ceiriog's text dwells on the passing of time and on the light that shines in darkness rather than on a parent at a cot. Singers who know both often describe the Welsh as the more melancholy of the two.

Are the English words a translation of the Welsh?

No. Harold Boulton's 1884 lyric is an original English poem written to fit the Welsh melody, not a translation of any Welsh text. The English and Welsh versions share a tune and a title phrase and nothing else. Literal English translations of the Welsh words do exist, but they are different from Boulton's verses and are rarely sung.

What does "Ar Hyd y Nos" mean?

It means "all through the night" in Welsh. "Ar hyd" carries the sense of "along" or "throughout", and "y nos" is "the night", so the phrase describes something continuing for the whole span of the night. Boulton kept that meaning in his refrain, which is the one point where the English and the Welsh line up exactly.

Who wrote All Through the Night?

The melody is a traditional Welsh air, first published by Edward Jones in Musical Relics of the Welsh Bards in 1784, with no known composer. The familiar English words were written by Sir Harold Boulton in 1884. The most widely sung Welsh words are by the poet John Ceiriog Hughes, written in the nineteenth century, so three separate hands are involved in what people usually think of as one old song.